Published: October 2024
Just how independent is US online magazine The Unz Review?
The Unz Review is a small US webzine launched in 2013 that currently has about 15k followers on Twitter. Its eponymous founder and editor is an American-Jewish financial software entrepreneur and political activist who previously was publisher of the American Conservative magazine.
In the SPR Media Navigator, the Unz Review is categorized as a conservative and fully independent media outlet (see figure above). However, some readers have wondered if this categorization is really justified. Unz Review skeptics have pointed out several peculiarities:
First, the editor has been strangely wrong on several key topics, either by supporting incorrect official positions or by promoting mistaken contrarian positions. Examples include the covid pandemic (“a US bioweapon attack to destroy China and Iran”), the WWII Holocaust (“a hoax”), October 7 (“a surprise attack”), staged terrorism (“nonsense”), and several other topics. (1)
Second, the Unz Review editor, although Jewish himself, promotes a cartoonish “neo-Nazi” columnist whose own website was previously run by a Jewish webmaster and FBI-linked hacker. “Neo-Nazi organizations” secretly run by Jewish activists or government informants have a long tradition in the United States and are a classic example of “controlled opposition”.
And third, up until the early 2000s, the editor was associated with several members of the neoconservative movement and even with the notorious PNAC group. According to the editor, by 2012 he realized he had been misled, broke ranks and became an independent publisher.
Understandably, these points raise the question if the Unz Review might perhaps be “controlled opposition” aimed at misdirecting and discrediting genuine skeptics, somewhat similar to Alex Jones’ notorious “Infowars” media operation (which is known to have multiple intelligence links).
Ironically, the Unz Review publisher is often quick to accuse other authors of being “controlled opposition” or “cognitive infiltrators”. In the case of Black American podcaster Candace Owens, though, the publisher for some reason got it backwards and accused her of being “promoted opposition” only after she cut ties with the Ben Shapiro media empire in the wake of October 7.
The Unz Review has a special focus on ethnic questions, including the so-called “Jewish question”, and many of its readers appear to be national conservatives. However, as a Jewish neoconservative the publisher used to support immigration and in a 1999 essay he warned that “there are few forces that could so easily break America as the coming of white nationalism.”
There is also the question of how the Unz Review owner and editor became a millionaire in the first place. Although rarely mentioned, his one-man software firm, Wall Street Analytics, was specialized in collateralized debt obligations (CDO) and mortgage-backed securities (MBS), the very products that caused the US subprime crisis and the global financial crisis. In 2006, one year before the crash, he sold his company to credit rating agency Moody’s.
Overall, the publisher’s life story can be seen both as a success and as a tragedy: a Jewish boy who was born out of wedlock and raised on welfare became a self-made millionaire, but failed as an academic (aborted PhD), politician (failed runs as California governor and US Senator), political activist (his only success, a 1998 initiative to end bilingual education in California, was overturned in 2016), and publisher (fired by the American Conservative in 2012 for “overbearing behavior”).
Despite these important considerations, SPR media analysts have so far found no direct evidence that the Unz Review editor is some kind of “gatekeeper” or “disinformation agent”. Rather, the main issue appears to be a combination of a general lack of subject-matter expertise, long-standing political activism, strong biases, and several psychological idiosyncracies. In many cases the editor tries to apply “indirect reasoning”, but this usually fails due to unwarranted assumptions.
More generally, independent media frequently challenge establishment media narratives and provide alternative perspectives, but they cannot be expected to be correct on every single topic. Because of this, it is often useful to compare different outlets and authors. At any rate, SPR will continue to monitor the media landscape and will update the Media Navigator accordingly.
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Update: In his response to this article, the Unz Review publisher suggested that SPR might be “an ultra-ultra-deep-cover operation run by Mossad” to “defend the Holocaust within the conspiracy-community”, thus very much confirming the above analysis. The Unz Review publisher previously contacted SPR twice to promote his work; when it was explained to him that many of his assumptions and conclusions were incorrect, he reacted very negatively.
Footnote 1: SARS-2 is a synthetic flu-like virus that cannot be used to attack just one city or country (but may be used to cause an artificial pandemic); the Holocaust has been misrepresented but it wasn’t a “hoax” at all; the Israeli leadership had detailed knowledge of the Hamas plans and preparations prior to October 7; staged terrorism is a well-documented phenomenon.
The editor’s analyses of the Bolshevik Revolution, the Second World War, the moon landing debate, the HIV/AIDS debate, the question of Jewish origins, Latino immigration into the US, the Vietnam War POW story, and several other topics, are also incorrect, flawed, or misleading.
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You have been reading:
How Independent Is The Unz Review?
An analysis by Swiss Policy Research
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References
- The curious case of Ron Unz (The Spectator, 2018)
- This Man Controls California (New Republic, 1999)
- Being Ron Unz (LA Weekly, 1999)